Review: Ms. Marvel #1

Story:

“The internationally-beloved, butt-kicking, smack-talking, most adorable super hero makes her triumphant return.

Look out world, Kamala Khan is back and officially an Avenger! Yup, the dream to end all dreams has happened for Kamala. She’s toe to toe with the best of the best, but will being one of Earth’s mightiest heros be everything she imagined? Is being a celebrity hero as wonderful as Kamala has hoped? Plus: WHO IS THAT WITH BRUNO??”
Read more about this issue on Goodreads.

Review:

Kamala is now an Avenger and has everything that comes with that so she’s adding avenging to an already busy life and things are going to get missed. Some of them quite big things.

For example it’s 8 months on from telling Bruno to move on and so he’s got himself a girlfriend. And that’s not her only problem that happened when she wasn’t paying attention. Developers are buying out all the local shops and gentrifying the entire place and they’re using her image to promote it. Which is something the community doesn’t like at all.

She investigates and it turns out they are not quite what they seem when their security guards have high tech weapons and security drones that target suspicious loiterers. I know she was actually causing a problem for security but I can’t help but wonder if this is a comment on racial profiling. It’s mostly the wording that gives me that impression. I tend to miss things that people don’t state outright so I’m working on catching when people imply things.

The first half of the book is about showing you where Kamala is and I love that Loki’s lightning golems are still at the school and one of them is even a crossing guard.

The second half of the book deals with how she got where she is by showing a flashback of how Bruno moved on in her absence and found a girlfriend. With a background subplot of Kamala dealing with a giant frog throughout their progressing relationship.

She may be an avenger but she’s also a teenager and not equipped to handle quite so much at once. She lashes out at Bruno when she realises he’s moved on and even body shames his girlfriend because she’s plus sized (and that’s refreshing because the rest of the female characters are skinny). What’s even better is he calls her out on it and she apologises. That’s what I love about Kamala she feels like a real person who makes mistakes but she learns from them as well. She evolves as a character.

The art inside is a little different from the cover but not enough to really stand out. This is another comic where the image doesn’t really represent what’s going on inside. Cover Kamala looks a lot more serious than her inside counterpart who is ecstatic over being an Avenger and getting into fun adventures. I like that she’s got an avengers necklace on.

This is exactly the sort of comic that was missing from my childhood. Instead of reading Spiderman, who never stopped wining and having progressively worse things happen to him as the writers tried to break him, I could have been reading something fun. Where the character evolves and grows as a person. I hope they never do to Kamala what they did to spiderman and reset her to a previous state because they want to appeal to the young people. But of course they will it’s Marvel. (side note I really liked spiderman and I’m still bitter about One More Day.) I wonder how long we can go before this gets a reboot and all the fun is sucked out.

What I’m trying to say is buy this comic it’s very good. And I think the last page had wolverine riding a sloth in the top right corner. I think I’m missing a reference but then that’s nothing new.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Next: Review: Ms Marvel #2

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